Pizza dough

When I was little, I both loved and feared pizza night in equal measure.  I loved helping my Mom make pizza, everything from squishing the dough into the pan to all the spreading and sprinkling of toppings, it was one of the few meals that Mom let us help prepare and it was fun.  I also feared it because it meant I would often have to eat pizza and they tasted awful.  Once the meal preparation was over and the pizza was in the oven, the dread would start to set in.  Sometimes Mom was nice and let me have a sandwich for dinner instead, after all it's not like pizza was good for you, so I guess she didn't feel the need to force the issue all that much but I remember having to choke down that meal more times than I cared to and it pained me everytime.

I don't want to sound like my Mom was a bad cook she had her ups and downs like most home cooks, I'm going to place the blame for this one squarely on the shoulders of chef boy-ar-dee, their pizza kits were horrible things.  Inside that green box was of a sachet of dough mix, a long skinny tin of sauce with little slices of extra-hot, skinny pepperoni floating in it, and another tin of grated parmesan cheese that was probably full of additives to stop it from melting when they sealed the tin.  Add to that the less than stellar quality extra toppings and plastic cheese from the fridge and you have a recipe for a grim meal.  There's a limit to what you could expect in a small town in northern Canada in the 1980's but that early experience was so off-putting to me that I was labelled a funny kid that didn't like pizza.  I don't know what prompted Mom to stop buying those kits, I remember a few different pizza situations as I got older, between pre-made pizzas from the grocery store and my when Dad got a new job with a company that gave meal vouchers when employees worked overtime that could be redeemed at local take out places, I remember the calibre of pizza improving.

Thinking back I'm trying to remember if I really was that much of a picky eater as a child.  I quite happily ate fried liver and drank goats milk, you can't say a child who will do that is that picky, but there were a lot of foods I just didn't want to put in my mouth.  Now that I'm grown up I've been adventurous enough to try most of my hated foods again, either as a whole dish or as separate ingredients and most of what I didn't like I have narrowed down to them containing mayonnaise (or mayo-like sauces), but I also didn't like intensely spicy things or fatty foods that produced a slimy cling in my mouth.  I would say the jury is still out on my picky eater child status.  Once I stopped hating pizza, I can remember still having a few incidents of being a brat about what I would or would not eat on my pizza, but a lot of foods I didn't like have gained my affection slowly and now there's very few things I won't eat.  I also believe that even if you don't like something right away you should give a food more than one chance, except mayo that one has had hundreds of chances and it's still vile.

I don't think I was missing out on too much back then by not liking pizza, the selection of toppings that I can recall was so limited that if it was still the sum total of the pizza experience I don't think I would bother with it all that much now.  Thankfully that's not the case and I look at everything from vegetables to seafood as a potential pizza topping, spinach and potato - yum, aubergine and bacon - yup, clams and zucchini - that's good too, if it sounds like a good combination I'll try it on a pizza.  On my last trip to Italy I think I ate about 20 different types pizza and I was only there a week!  All of it was pre-made sell you a slice to take away hole-in-the-wall-establishment food, but the variety on offer and at most places the quality of ingredients just blew my mind, and you can ask for a slice any size you want, they charge you by weight.  Wandering around a historic city looking tourist sites of immense cultural significance interspersed with breaks for munching lots of little slices of thin crispy pizza the size of a half sandwich is one of my definitions of happiness.

Pizza Dough

In a measuring cup mix
225ml warm water
7g dry active yeast
1 tbsp white sugar
mix to dissolve the yeast and wait for it to start foaming

Using a stand mixer with a dough hook, in the bowl of your mixer add
375g plain flour (or bread flour or if you want to get fancy Italian Tipo00 flour)
1 tsp salt
2 tsbp olive oil
and the water/yeast mixture

Turn the machine on low and let it work magic until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes with a sturdy machine.

And you're good to go!  I don't do the rise-knock back-rise again process with pizza dough.  I normally make about 6 individual pizzas out of this about 9 - 10 inches diameter but they're never properly round, I like my crust to be thin and crispy but my greedy eyes want it to be the size of my plate, you can make however many pizzas of whatever size or thickness you like.

Make sure your oven rack is in the lowest position in the oven.  If you have a pizza stone use following your manufacturer's directions.
Pre-heat your oven to 400^F (around 200^C) or hotter if  your oven goes higher and you're brave enough,  the hotter the better.

Divide the dough into your chosen portion and roll out to your desired size.  I sprinkle a handful of cornmeal on the countertop to roll my pizza dough out on top of and use flour on the rolling pin, but it's your pizza so do as you like.

Slide your pizza onto your baking tray then start loading it up.

Decorate with sauce or not, toppings and seasonings of your choice, cheese or not, good ingredients will make a better pizza than poor quality ones and you have just gone to the bother of making the base from scratch, I'd say you deserve good toppings.

I don't think you have to cover every visible bit of the surface with toppings but it is nice to get something yummy in every bite.

Bake for 7 - 12 minutes, keep an eye on it through your oven window, it can go from perfectly done to burned really fast but if you take it out too soon, it won't be done on the bottom.

If I'm not going to eat all the portions of pizza dough at once (and let's face it, on my own I'm not) I usually roll them out to size before freezing them.  I transfer each base to a sheet of baking paper, stack the papers up with the pizza bases on top of each other, trim away the excess paper and wrap the stack in plastic film.  I then put the stack onto a baking tray or cutting board so it stays flat and put it in the freezer.  The baking paper stops them from sticking together.  Once they're frozen I can reclaim the board.  Then I have a bunch of dinners half-way made waiting for me, if I take one out of the freezer before I start to heat the oven, because I roll them so thin, they usually thaw in the time it takes to pre-heat the oven.  You don't have to thaw it to start spreading the toppings so it's ready to go by the time the oven's fully hot.  Faster than ordering from a shop.